A special page is a "virtual" MediaWiki article. Instead of being loaded from a file or database like a normal MediaWiki page, its content is generated on the fly using PHP code.

By default, MediaWiki builds the list of special pages from two sources: a list of builtin special pages hard coded into the MediaWiki core and the configuration variable $wgSpecialPages. As a final step, MediaWiki passes the default list to all the functions attached to the SpecialPage_initList.